VietNamNet Bridge – On October 10, 2008, the police arrested a high school student in the central province of Quang Nam. He was discovered to be the culprit of the DDOS attack that has stirred up the IT community for the last few days.

Investigators found out that the subject, a student named P., persuaded his friends to install viruses in computers in public Internet cafés. From the computers, the viruses were spread by USB. As such, the culprit was able to create a wide network of botnets with some 1,000 computers.

The botnets were the main tool that helped him carry out DDOS attacks on some websites, namely 5giay.vn, nhatnghe.com, from October 5-8. The culprit confessed to attacking the websites after he was shown irrefutable evidence.

Bkis’ website also a victim?

Website www.bkav.com.vn was inaccessible during the days the DDOS attacks were occurring. Therefore, the IT community believed that the website was also a victim of the attack.

However, Nguyen Tu Quang, Director of Bkis, on October 5, after local newspapers, IT forums and blogs had reported news about the DDOS attack on Bkis’ website, officially denied this.

He said Bkis anticipated that the hacker would attack Bkis in order to show his strength. Therefore, Bkis decided to trap the hacker.

As forecast, the hacker then attacked Bkis’ website with the same method he used to attack 5giay.vn and nhatnghe.com.

Quang said that after the news spread that even Bkis’ website suffered a DDOS attack, P. said on a forum of the hacker community that he was the author of the attack, boasting that he could destroy any website he wanted.

Quang said that the inaccessibility to bkav.com.vn on October 8 was because Bkis set a trap for the hacker.

Online crime wave

Senior lieutenant-colonel Tran Van Hoa, Head of the High-Tech Crime Fighting Agency, said that the number of Internet crimes has been increasing recently.

Hoa said that in order to repress Internet crimes, in November, the National Assembly will ratify the amended Criminal Law. The bill stipulates that those spreading harmful informatics programmes, illegally controlling computers or computer networks that make computers lose control and cause severe consequences could be fined VND20-200mil, or receive 1-5 years in prison.

Nguyen Tu Quang, Director of Bkis, has suggested that businesses equip themselves with the ‘urgent defence’ mechanism. In case of a DDOS attack, the mechanism will discover abnormal accesses in a website. After that, businesses should report the attacks to investigative agencies to track down the criminals.

(Source: Tien phong)